James Petras on fighting imperialism
By Robert Clough

In an important article Anti-Imperialist Politics: Class Formation and Socio-Political Action, recently published on the radical Mexican website www.rebelion.org, James Petras, the US revolutionary academic, analyses the recent development of anti-imperialist movements in both oppressed and imperialist nations. Whilst he understandably concentrates his attention on Latin America, he also takes into account the development of Iraqi resistance to US/British occupation. As for the development of anti-imperialist movements in imperialist nations, he understandably pays most attention to the US; however, his comments on the US anti-war movement are in many ways applicable to those in other imperialist countries, and to Britain in
particular.

Why should we consider Petras' views on this subject? Firstly, because he has a revolutionary standpoint. Secondly, as we shall see, he develops a clear class analysis of the movements he is analysing. Thirdly, his views are influential particularly amongst Latin American socialists. Fourthly, like FRFI, he stands in complete solidarity with the Cuban revolution. Lastly, the issues he raises are of great political importance for anyone seeking to build a serious anti-racist, anti-imperialist movement in today's conditions.

The starting point of Petras's analysis is that there is no `single internationally dominant organisation which is fully opposed to imperialism as a system of power. Rather, what predominates is a variety of single-issue movements opposing imperial policies and institutions.'

As examples of `single issue movements', he cites those in Latin America which oppose the US-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas Agreement (FTAA). In the US itself, it is not so clear cut. Petras says,


`the anti-globalisation and anti-(Iraq, Afghanistan) war campaigning contains both anti-imperialists and "imperial reformers"; groups which generally support US imperial power but oppose the particular way power is exercised, or the specific locations in which it manifests itself. Others oppose the behaviour of the multinational corporations but not the imperial state and system in which they are embedded.'

These movements are:

`anti-imperialist to the degree that they mobilise popular forces to oppose an important manifestation of imperial expansion, raise popular consciousness about the motives of the US and EU regimes and open the possibility of deepening and extending resistance to imperialism as a system'.

But:

`The potentialities of these single-issue politics are frequently not realised; the struggle over a single issue remains isolated from a general rejection of imperialism, and the victory or defeat of imperial power usually ends the mobilisation.'

He illustrates his point by reference to the anti-Vietnam war movement: once conscription had ended and the US had been defeated, anti-imperialism went into decline; there was no mobilisation in support of Cuba to end the blockade, for instance. He continues: 'The key to identifying the dynamics (forward or backward) of single-issue anti-imperialist movements is politics: the ideology, the leaders and the programs around which the movements are organised. Most of the short-term impacts are the result of the leaders' ideology of pragmatic lowest-denominator politics, focusing exclusively on the most immediate issue (imperial policy) dissociated from imperialism as a system of power, eschewing any political challenge for regime or state power, and accommodating or subordinating the mass movement to opportunist dissident politicians from the major imperial parties, who seek to capitalise on the mass protest for electoral purposes.'

Although Petras has the US anti-war movement in his sights, what he says is to great degree applicable to the Stop the War Coalition (STWC) in Britain. Dissident politicians from the major imperial parties, in particular Labour, have repeatedly appeared on Stop the War platforms. The `lowest common denominator' politics of the campaign allowed the STWC to include the openly imperialist Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats, on to the platform of the 15th February demonstration without any serious challenge. In summary, the STWC has kept the movement in a state of political backwardness and has failed completely to raise the political consciousness of the many hundreds of thousands who have joined the anti-war demonstrations of the past two years.


Continuing his analysis, Petras says: 'single issue anti-imperialist mobilisations, like the anti-globalisation, erupt, extend and then become routine and decline, as they fail to connect political instruments to challenge for power, with popular mass struggles. In the case of the anti-globalisation struggle, the false premises of the ideologues of the movement, the idea of the multi-national corporations as autonomous powers divorced from the imperial state, failed to anticipate the imperial wars and colonial occupation. The reorientation of many anti-globalisation activists to the anti-Iraq war movement led to a massive increase in protests on the single issue of the war followed by a collapse after the US conquered and occupied Iraq. No mass movement has emerged to oppose the US colonial regime or support the Iraqi resistance.'

This is a central challenge to socialists and anti-imperialists in the imperialist heartland. We seek the defeat of the occupation forces in Iraq. We therefore have to support the resistance of the Iraqi people, and their right to take up armed struggle against US/British forces. Hence we cannot accept the recent slogan the SWP and STWC have adopted: `Don't make Iraq another Vietnam'. They view the Vietnam war from the perspective of US imperialism, not from the point of view of the victorious Vietnamese. The most important point about Vietnam for anti-imperialists is that it was a defeat for US imperialism and that is what we seek for imperialism today in Iraq. Our slogan should therefore be the converse of the STWC's; we do
want to see a new Vietnam.

Petras concludes his analysis of movements in the imperialist countries by saying that 'The eruption of single issue mass movements opposed to specific anti-imperialist policies do not necessarily lead to an advancing, radicalising and consequential anti-imperialist movement, unless the movement goes beyond single issues and develops a programme and leadership capable of linking anti-imperialism to system transformation.'

This is the challenge for socialists and anti-imperialists in imperialist countries such as Britain: to extend the politics of the anti-war movement so that it becomes not just an anti-war movement but a movement against imperialism as a whole and British imperialism in particular. This will require a political struggle against those who seek to keep it within its present confines, ones which are acceptable to those `dissident' politicians of the major imperialist parties.

The emergence of anti-imperialist movements in oppressed nations Petras is at his most powerful in describing the emergence of anti-imperialist movements in Latin America. He establishes a number of conditions that have stimulated the development of anti-imperialist movements in oppressed countries: colonial invasion and occupation, long-term imperialist military intervention as in Colombia, mass impoverishment as a result of privatisations or unequal trade and investment. Whatever the condition, however, it has its source in imperialist domination, so that resistance has had to take on an anti-imperialist character. Petras is particularly strong in describing how in Latin America `imperial-induced mass impoverishment, land concentration and peasant displacement has been a key factor igniting rural social movements that have been at the forefront of struggles against ALCA (the Spanish acronym for FTAA)'. Mechanisms for this have included:

- Undermining small and medium farmers through `free market' policies that allow the massive influx of subsidised US farm exports;
- Concentrating ownership and displacing poor and landless peasants in favour of agro-export firms which focus on export agriculture;
- Increasing class polarisation by ending constraints on foreign ownership of the land;
- Lowering prices for local produce whilst increasing the costs of credit, driving rural producers into unsustainable debt or bankruptcy.

Whatever the cause, the consequence has been peasant displacement, an increase in the numbers who are landless, and massive rural impoverishment. This has been compounded by targeting communities growing indigenous crops (in particular coca) with `eradication' programmes which have destroyed the livelihood of millions in
Bolivia, Peru and Colombia.

Alongside these rural developments have been wholesale attacks on public sector employees through a combination of privatisations and budget cuts to pay foreign creditors, with millions having lost their jobs and many having wage cuts of up to 40% over the past decade. Petras concludes that `the end result has been the "proletarianisation" of public sector workers as a result of low income, job insecurity and diminished status' with the consequence that `imperial policies and institutions have undermined these two pillars of "political stability" for imperial hegemony, small rural property owners and middle-income professionals in the public
sector'.

These two social forces - impoverished peasants and public sector workers - have been the core of anti-imperialist movements in Latin America. In contrast the private-sector trade unions have played little role in their development:

`In fact, the industrial workers and in particular their trade unions have been the least active and least militant component of the anti-imperialist movements; most of the trade union officials have consolidated control and have become closely linked to tripartite pacts with the state and employers, and reject independent class action, let alone active anti-imperialist solidarity.'

Some trade union federations of course have played an openly reactionary role, for instance in Venezuela.

Imperialism has not only re-structured the working class and rural population: it has also transformed the capitalist class in Latin America. It has imposed bankruptcy on hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized locally-owned manufacturers, forcing them out of business with a flood of cheap manufactured imports. The same is happening in retail with foreign-owned department stores and supermarkets displacing local retailers. At the same time, `imperial policies have created imperial associates' - a completely parasitic layer of lawyers, publicists, consultants and so on, a completely dependent section of the ruling class `who serve as intermediaries in facilitating lucrative privatisations, state contracts and monopoly market controls.' Anti-imperialist movements in Latin America are therefore not undifferentiated in their class composition; in their bulk they are made up of wage workers, unemployed and sub-employed in the cities, students and self-employed and particularly of peasants, Indian and subsistence farmers and landless rural workers. There are not differentiated "multitudes", rather the participants are organised and/or convoked by class-based social organisations whose leaders and organisers have "histories" of involvement in class struggle, class politics either in the workplace or neighbourhoods.

Today's movements differ from those of the past in that there is an absence of any progressive bourgeoisie for the factors cited above `either as a hegemonic power or as a participant'. In addition, their class foundation has shifted from industrial trade unions to peasant and rural movements. A crucial point that Petras makes is that the relationship between imperialism and the poor and the oppressed is far more immediate today than in the past:

`Imperial penetration of the nation state and regime and financial hierarchies means that imperialist classes and local collaborator classes are the initial point of conflict between capital and labour; Imperialism does not merely influence and control the national, economic, cultural and political structures, but it also operates at the macro and micro political and socio-economic levels.'

Hence even very local struggles such as that against privatisation in towns such as Cochabamba in Bolivia immediately take on an anti-imperialist dynamic: after all, it does not take much effort:

`for the popular classes to identify the sources of their adversity when the IMF dictates a S(tructural) A(djustment) P(olicy) which results in lower public funding, loss of public employment and the termination of clinics in the barrios, overcrowded classrooms, teachers' strikes and children begging in the street. Anti-imperialist movements are no longer middle class dominated nationalist movements, they are class-based because imperialism is embedded in everyday work and household survival.'

Hence resistance in Latin America is based on the poor and oppressed, and takes on an almost immediate anti-imperialist character in contrast to movements in the imperialist countries.

Petras illustrates his general points with a brief assessment of each of the major movements in Latin America where `the intersection of US imperial expansion and rising popular discontent with declining living standards is most intense' following four years (1999-2002) of negative growth. In addition to these movements he assesses the two governments that are `partially independent' of imperialism: Cuba (see box) and Venezuela; his succinct analysis of the ambiguities of the Chavez regime is very strong. Throughout he stresses that these Latin American movements are class based, and that `all the successful movements and regimes have developed powerful leaders who have long-term links to the mass struggle.'

Movements in the imperialist countries:

Petras is clear that the single-issue anti-imperialist movements in the imperialist nations are far more backward politically than those in Latin America. Historically, anti-war movements in the US have had significance only when US military forces were defeated or unable to win and suffered heavy casualties, such as in Vietnam and Korea. Other interventions have elicited little response, or in the case of Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, considerable public support for intervention. Iraq seems set to change this.

`[the] large scale popular opposition and sustained urban guerrilla warfare' has resulted in a significant shift in US public opinion, with nearly half opposed to Bush by the end of August. However, whilst the war on Iraq coincided with increasingly severe attacks on living standards of the US labour force `there has been little "movement" against imperialism from the working and salaried classes.'

The tactics of movements in the US and Europe differ markedly from those in Latin America. The former focus on the `Big Event' such as Seattle, Genoa, Davos and so on; they are not rooted in the day-to-day struggles against imperialism which have proved far more successful in sustaining struggles and in educating the local population in Latin America. `Big Events' like the World Social Forum and its national and municipal offspring do take place in Latin America, but have a symbolic character; and anyway, as Petras notes, the `WSF has evolved from being a critic of imperialism to a much more ambiguous enterprise, especially as one of its key sponsors, the Workers Party of Brazil, has evolved into a pro-imperialist party.'

The dispute between the SWP and the London Social Forum over arrangements to hold the European Social Forum (ESF) in London endorse this assessment. In a published email exchange between SWP leader Alex Callinicos and a supporter of the London Social Forum, Callinicos defends the need to involve Ken Livingstone in the ESF bid, saying that Livingstone `did win the mayoral election in 2000 by running to the left of New Labour and he has been consistent in his public opposition to the war on Iraq.'

Yet Livingstone is now set to be welcomed back into New Labour, so we must ask will the SWP continue to promote him?

According to Petras, the tactics of the `Big Event' reveals a further difference between movements in the imperialist countries and popular struggles in Latin America:

`Programmatically, Northern movements are a mixture of progressive reformers of imperialism, anti-capitalist radicals and chauvinist protectionist trade unionists, which makes it difficult to concretise on-going activities.' This general characterisation of the `Northern' movement is true of the STWC in Britain, involving as it does an alliance between `progressive reformers of imperialism' (the left of the Labour Party), anti-capitalist radicals and the `chauvinist protectionist trade unionists' who tried to prevent a debate on Iraq at the Labour Party conference. Outside of the `Big Events' the latest of which was the 20 November demonstration against Bush's visit, there has been little of the ongoing activity of the sort that takes place in Latin America. Most scandalously, action in support of the Palestinian resistance has dwindled to almost nothing: 150 people in Trafalgar Square on the 9 November international protest against the Apartheid Wall shows a complete failure to `concretise ongoing
activities'.

Petras is therefore correct to point out that the strategic goals of the bulk of the movements in imperialist countries are profoundly reformist. He goes on to say:
`More significantly there are deep political differences between the Northern and Latin American intellectuals in relationship to imperialist intervention and solidarity with Cuba. US and European "progressive" intellectuals condemned Cuba's arrest of US-financed agents posing as dissidents and the application of capital punishment to terrorists who pirated a Cuban vessel and threatened the lives of its passengers. In Latin America the great majority of anti-imperialist intellectuals and movements declared their solidarity with Cuba, recognising the US funding and control of the "dissidents".'

He continues:

`Northern progressive intellectuals temper their criticism of imperialism with condemnation of Latin American anti-imperialists who don't fit their preconceived model of an opposition. Behind the differing attitudes towards Cuba is a more profound strategic difference. The movements and intellectuals in the US are still mostly tied to the pro-imperial institutions of civil society (the "left wing" of the Democratic Party, the AFL-CIO, the pro-imperial, pro-coup trade union confederation) and have always drawn back from supporting successful social revolutions in Latin America.'

This is critical. FRFI has constantly pointed out the ideological significance of Cuban socialism in the struggle against imperialism today. It represents the progressive side in the historic split between communism and social imperialism. Opposition to Cuba within the anti-war movement is at its most virulent in Britain where the SWP condemns Cuba from the perspective of the CIA and Miami exiles. The SWP has chosen which side it is on: the left-wing of `New Labour' and the bankrupt official trade union leadership rather than revolutionaries in the oppressed nations of the world.

The different political standpoint of the anti-war movements in imperialist countries is a product of their different class composition. Unlike the movements in Latin America, the movement in the US is made up of `middle class professionals, students and NGO affiliates' (p30) rather than the dispossessed and impoverished working class. This is equally true for Britain. This means that imperialist exploitation and oppression does not have the same immediacy as it has in Colombia or Bolivia: the relatively privileged conditions of the majority of the working class in the imperialist countries have not yet been significantly undermined. Hence the material conditions for anti-war movements in the imperialist countries to immediately take on an anti-imperialist dynamic have not yet been realised. This is why political education is so important: without it, it will be impossible to raise the political consciousness of those who are now being drawn into struggle for the first time, and the movement will remain politically backward.

Petras, however, is rightly optimistic about the future. He concludes that: 'the class configurations of the anti-imperialist movements, their pre-eminent popular character, and linkage to resistance against overt colonial rule (whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or via the FTAA in Latin America) ensure that the struggle is not likely to be betrayed by defecting bourgeois nationalists. In other words, the class forces involved are those most likely to be prejudiced by the abandonment of the anti-imperialist struggle.'

He points to tactical reversals for imperialism: the failure of the April 2002 coup in Venezuela, the appearance of anti-colonial resistance in Iraq, and the failure of Plan Colombia to defeat FARC/ELN. Finally, he argues that:

`imperial rule is based on class relations and as the resistance grows in the Third World and the human and economic costs in the US and Europe grow, they begin to engender political and social conflicts within and among the imperial powers of the US and Europe and in the not too distant future could result in a unified challenge
to imperial power.'

It is this future that socialists have to prepare for. The STWC perspective is too limited for this since it is tailored to the interests of the privileged sections of the working class. Instead we need a genuinely anti-imperialist perspective. This is one based on overt solidarity with the Iraqi resistance and the Palestinian Intifada which challenges those who seek to reduce either to matters of human rights. It is a perspective which will challenge those who want to advance their own electoral interests whether it be Charles Kennedy on the right, or George Galloway to the left. It will give solidarity to those fighting back against US/British military and political intervention, for instance, in Colombia or Venezuela; and in particular to Cuban socialism. Even if as yet it cannot organise the poorer sections of the working class to any significant degree, it will have to represent their interests, for instance in a struggle against the racist British state. Finally, we need to recognise one crucial element missing from Petras's conclusion, that the proletarianisation of large sections of the middle class and affluent working class will not be confined to the oppressed nations, and that when this happens in the imperialist nations under the impact of a recession, immense possibilities will open up or socialists and anti-imperialists.
Robert Clough


The URL for Petras's article is
www.rebelion.org/petras/english/030926petras.pdf